When you’re at home, you probably go to a gym, or at least have a walking or biking route laid out. You know where it goes and how long it takes. When you’re on the road, there is no such route. I love using the Runkeeper App on my phone to tell me how long I’ve walked, or biked. So, we can just head out on any road or path we find and when we reach a distance that is half of the total desired walk, we’ll turn around. Runkeeper even has suggested routes for wherever you are – just go to the website RunKeeper.com and click on the Search icon and choose Routes. You enter where you are, what activity, and how far you want to go and you will see routes entered by other people in this area.

If you have the RunKeeper app installed on your phone, you can open it and just click Start Activity once you’ve set out for a walk, or a bike ride. It will then talk to you every 5 minutes (or whatever time interval you choose) and tell you how far you’ve gone and how long it’s taken. There have been many times when we’ve just started out for a leisurely stroll and turned RunKeeper on to track our route. Just hearing, “It’s been 5 minutes and you’ve walked 0.2 miles” is motivation enough to walk a little faster! You can pause it at any point in case you just want to sit a bit. At the end of your activity, RunKeeper will show you a map of your route in addition to all the statistics of Time, Length, and calories burned.

Even if you’re not interested in a workout, using RunKeeper can have some benefits. We were parked at the Oregon coast and I decided to take a long, solitary walk on the beach. Actually it was so long and solitary that it occurred to me I might not know how to get back to the park from the beach side! Yes, there was this interesting tipi style pile of driftwood marking the path, but when I looked down the beach I saw other similar markers! So, I decided to turn on RunKeeper on my phone. I had no intention of “exercising!” I was just going to stroll. But, RunKeeper lets you know exactly how far you’ve gone. So, I figured if it told me I’d gone a mile when I decided to turn around, then when I hit the 2 mile spot I’d be back! That made me feel really relaxed as I strolled down the beach.
At one point, I found a nice big driftwood log where I could sit and use it as a back rest. I don’t think I could be any happier!

 

• App Name: RunKeeper
• Author: FitnessKeeper, Inc.
• Price: Free
• Available for Android and Apple iOS and Windows Phone
• The RunKeeper Website has lots more info. It also synchronizes with all the information gathered by your device when using RunKeeper

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